Small businesses have a wealth of information regarding their customers, supply chains, and other aspects of their day-to-day operations that are stored in a variety of locations. For example, transaction data entries and payment transactions that have been cleared forwarded to payment processors may include valuable information relevant to the optimization of operations at the small business. In addition, other sources of information exist that can help clarify the cause and effect relationship between external conditions and changes in the performance of the small business. Further, small businesses typically have some information stored in a merchant server that may include payments and purchases that have not yet been forwarded to payment processors, or other types of information including customer payment preferences and customer delivery or pickup preferences. Examples of data that may be extracted from such information include market share data. U.S. patent application Ser. No. 14/498,194 entitled “Method and System for Identifying Merchant Market Shares Based on Purchase Data” filed on Sep. 26, 2014 describes one way to obtain market share data from the information available from businesses and is incorporated by reference in its entirety.
Although this corpus of information is being generated by a typical small business, the resources are not ordinarily available for the small business to analyze this information to derive useful information the small business can use to improve their performance. Even if the small business has the resources to analyze this information and derive useful information, the techniques used to derive the useful information are specific to interpreting large volumes of various types of information and may not be within the skills of a typical small business owner. Accordingly a technical problem exists where there is a very specific skill set is needed to properly extract actionable information from the information generated by a typical business.
There therefore exists a need to address this technical problem by providing sales information and other insights through a conversational interface so that the small business owner can easily analyze the wealth of available information and derive useful information that can be used to improve the performance of the small business. The conversational interface is of particular use because the small business owner need not know specific terms of art needed to derive useful information and can instead simply submit natural language queries to determine how to improve the performance of their small business. The technical problem is therefore addressed by providing an easy to use interface that allows for actionable information to be extracted from the information generated by a typical business.